


The House of Night and Noon

by Twilit



Series: The Gospel Bright and Tenebrous [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Eldritch Horror AU, Gen, Implied Relationships, Other, Supernatural AU - Freeform, TW: Self Harm, tw: body horror, tw: gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-06
Updated: 2013-08-26
Packaged: 2017-12-22 16:09:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/915265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Twilit/pseuds/Twilit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a house in Rainbow Falls where the sun shines too brightly, or not at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The House

Your hands shake with weariness and your eyes burn with exhaustion and lack of sleep. It is four thirty in the morning and you are about to fall asleep on your drafting table, pretty likely to drool all over brand new plans that will undoubtedly, at some point in the morning, be revealed to have some manner of critical flaw other than being smudged by your caffeine-laden drool.

So attractive.

You know this because that is what has happened with painful regularity for the past six months once your exploratory calculations into other realities (or dimensions, you weren't really sure what to call them yet) gave you an outline of how to proceed in your, let's face it, lunatic quest. The problem with outlines is that they need filling in. And in science, the filling in happens with experiments. As much as you're intellectually and professionally conditioned to view failures as stepping stones to success, they're still failures. When your lunatic quest involves trying to bring back the soul (consciousness?) of your comatose daughter, failures don't just sting. They crush.

Your name is Roxy Lalonde and it has been two years since you blasted your possessed daughter with a reality-gun that you drunkenly assembled, the workings of which you still weren't clear on. Two years since she reverted to normal, just without any brain activity and barely any life signs. Two years since you wept with sorrow and rage over your daughter's laptop and two years since you began to decode her journal.

Those two years have been... trying.

To say the least.

\--

The script, or runes, or whatever that made up your daughter's journal entries was like nothing you'd ever had to learn before. You picked up texts on language and linguistics, learned the basic ideas behind the construction of communications and then threw it all away when it proved useless for deciphering the twisting, eye-aching scratchings that seemed seared onto (into?) the pages. 

But you were determined not to fail this soon, so you took the methods that linguists applied to deciphering long-lost languages and deconstructed them. You looked at how people looked at languages, and through that disassembled lens, looked at how you were looking at the journal. 

Nothing.

Which wasn't to say that this wasn't a failure, you realized, your heart speeding up in your chest those many months ago. This just told you your frame of reference wasn't up to snuff. Your frame of reference being the very methods by which humans construct language, this led you to the inevitable conclusion that this language was not human (lol no shit sherlock) and _not meant to be able to be read by humans._

And humans weren't meant to build particle accelerators to smash atoms together like a speed skating accident gone horribly wrong to figure out what makes their universe tick. Tough shit alien beasties.

If this shit wasn't meant to be read by human minds, you'd run it through a non-human mind much, much faster than your own. You scanned the journal in, page by page, and had to laugh after the first scanner fried, its glass pane exploding inwards from something or other (in the book?). You had a lot of disposable income and many dozens of scanners later, you had a complete digital record of the journal. You backed it up to as many drive states as you could get your hands on. Sure enough, they started to corrupt. 

In between incinerating the corrupted drives and pointedly ignoring the non-faces screaming silently in the smoke, you wrote code. You started with the ideas behind OCR and then expanded on it. The program would analyze every curve, every twist, every angle, until it found patterns. Correlation, equation and solution, rule and exception. The universe was built on these things and you could figure them out. You _had_ to. And if there was no pattern, as a hyperaware portion of your brain suspected, it would look for something... else. 

One night, you were dozing fitfully in the desk chair, bottle of vodka held limply in one hand, mostly empty. The terminal you sat at pinged to alert you and you shook awake, bottle dropping from your grasp. It cracked against the tile, but you were past paying heed. You'd gotten your else.

You scrolled through the data so fast, most people wouldn't have been able to read it. Though your vision was swimming, you still sucked it all in. Despite (or because of?) your swimming vision, your drunken haze, you began to understand and your stomach heaved with revelation. You tabbed away from the text-recognition screen and to the scanned originals. Your vision clouded, swam and you blinked to clear it, again and again, but it remaining blurring and the world seemed to drift further and further away.

You awoke some time later, staring up at the ceiling. Your head pounded with a vengeance born of alcohol and dementia. You vaguely recalled hysterical laughter, hurling the keyboard against the wall. You tried to reach through the screen, crawl in and then- whiteness?

When you tried to push yourself up, your hand came down in something sticky and wet. Looking down, your blood had pooled with the vodka. When you wondered where you were bleeding from, a thick dollop leaked from your nose anew. Unconsciously, you licked at it, tasting the cloying iron.

And with that taste came the memory of - 

_\- Blessed be ye, O Seeker, that ye read these profane words, the gospel of the Noble Circle -_

your daughter's writing.

\--

It took you weeks to finish reading the journal. Weeks more of headaches, nose-bleeds, weeks filled with stabbing pain and flashes of eye-searing white. You stumbled about the house, drunk on some occasions, raving on others. Hell, sometimes both. It was a miracle you didn't hurt yourself. Well, much. Or unintentionally.

And the nightmares! They chased you from your sleep, and the lack of it probably helped drive you to the limits of your sanity. Sometimes you could almost see the ravenous maws of the Noble Circle, gaping beaks and tooth-ringed mouths, pseudopodia reaching, reaching for you. More horrifying were the ones that were almost human, or aped some aspect, like blunt white teeth in a fish’s mouth. Worse still were those dreams washed sterile white, and a dark spot approaching from a distance. You knew that spot represented something horrible, something that caused your animal hindbrain to shrink into itself, whimpering. The more you read, the closer it came, jerking and staggering sometimes, striding smoothly and familiarly others. By the end, you could tell it was a person.

But you kept reading. Page by page, a plodding, uncertain pace, like the drunken failure of a mother you were. You got there in the end, and when you sat down, weeping, to make sense of it, your scientific mind quailed. The ideas contained in your daughter's journal (and the fact that you could understand them) were a perversion of the physical world. What it boiled down to was that the beasts that possessed and took your daughter were a race born of a different reality, where the rules were different. They survived off slivers of energy from realities like yours, energy produced by merely thinking of them. But since not many knew of them, they were almost always ravenous. Ravenous and undying.

And they had your daughter.

\--

At the end of your reading, the dark figure approaching you in the white resolved.

"Hello, Mother."

\--

Once you recovered enough to make with the science again, you quickly figured out that you wouldn't be able to survive in their reality, nor they in yours. That's why they needed Rose and why you'd need something to keep you alive on the other side. And since you were pretty sure (but not entirely?) that you couldn't possess one of them, you'd need a different a way to get over. A vessel of a different sort. 

The Journal (lol when did you start capitolizing that shit gurl) pointed to ways at weakening the walls between realities by, well, sacrifice. In the language you shouldn't understand, you got the impression that the energy released by someone dying before their time made little dents in reality. The Noble Circle liked this, because it allowed the energy that sustained them to leak through more easily and completely. With some very shaky and experimental equations, you figured it should be possible not just to make a dent, but kick the goddamn door down.

All it would take is a sacrifice of colossal proportions. Something like a genocide.

Sure.

No problem.

Lawl, no.

Why kill millions of people when you could just build a different reactor of some kind to generate enough of that energy to kick said door down? Of course, you'd need to get some readings on the energy, if in fact it existed. Carrying that line of reasoning to its logical conclusion gives you the shakes as you go cold all over.

...oh well. Omelette, eggs, casual murder for science.  
Again, eyes like amethysts and hearts as hard. Terrifying women, really. We can't really be expected to let them live.  
You told yourself it was okay, because it was for Rose. You still whispered pleas for her forgiveness at her hospital bed.

\--

"You don't need to do this anymore," the dream of your daughter tells you.

"Come again?" This dream Rose doesn't look quite how you remember her. Washed out grey, instead of veiny, mutated black.

"You stopped them, shut the door."

"Pfft, whatevs. I just want my daughter back."

"And if I don't want to come back?"

\--

You'd built a lab and an observatory from the money your patents earned you, but a reactor, a new kind of reactor, was on another scale all together. You took a little, fierce sort of pride that the royalties from Rose's novel, now sold internationally, helped in its financing. All the same, you had to sell some stuff off. The lab was too valuable to you still, but the house was stripped bare of most, well, everything. Priceless (tasteless?) art got sold off at a bargain, antique furniture as well. Your halls became bare, lonely white in a way that still haunts you, reminds you of Rose's body, barely breathing in the lab.

The reactor got built, channeling its power into an array that would hurl enough entropic energy at the walls between realities to break them down for an instant, enough to cross over. Getting back would be a problem, but you left that to another day. First, a probe.

You fired the array once, and the probe vanished with a scream like a million people dying, as if having heard three weren't enough. Then a second later and on a hunch, fired it again, bringing the probe back, if off by almost a meter. It worked. You hadn't really been expecting that. It came back warped, it's plastic casing turning black and wriggling, worm-like things birthing from that alien discolouration. They died even as they were born, melting in the reality of a world that denied them. Shortly after its return, the probe was only a warped, broken mass.

You checked the instruments all the same. Most were useless, except for some esoteric energy sensor that you downloaded the data from and the little Squiddle watch, which you checked against your own. Off by fifteen seconds.

Your eyes burned at the implication.

\--

“Lolwhut.”

“What if where I am is preferable to a life on Earth, an evolutionary dead end? Preferable to living with a mother who is drunk more often than not? One who banished her only daughter to a nightmare reality than humanity was not meant to survive in. One who-”

“Stop it! Rosie, I only wanted to help like you asked!”

“And you managed to ruin that as well.”

\--

One of Rose’s friends visited once. Actually, you think it was her ex. You were pretty sure it was the same dark-skinned girl that you caught necking with Rose one afternoon. Goddamn, but you screwed up that apology.

She showed up one afternoon, all black lace and flouncy skirts. She carried one of those small umbrellas and wore a veil, as if she was in mourning. Could have been, for all you knew. You just thought it was morbidly appropriate at the time. It was almost a year since Rose’s collapse (as the rest of the world knows it) and she wanted to see her. You invited her in.

“Sorry about the mess. Haven’t really given a shit about cleaning since Rosie...”

“I understand Mrs. Lalonde, please do not feel bad.”

“Ha! Mrs. Lalonde. It’s either Dr. Lalonde or Roxy, Kan- yeah sorry, forgot your name already, what was it?”

“Kanaya, um... Dr. Lalonde.”

“Kanaya! Right. I’d offer you a drink, but I don’t think you’re legal yet. Not that that ever stopped anyone...”

“I appreciate the offer, but no thank you.” Kanaya’s tone was polite, kind of strained, and her words oddly precise. She had a quality of speaking that reminded you of Rose and her writing. Speaking of, that was your way to avoid making the situation awkward as shit!

“Hey, so have you read the Complacency yet?”

Kanaya’s face finally gives way to a small smile. “Yes! It is very... Rose-like. I love it. I’m surprised that you published it.”

“Hey, Rosie obviously wanted to get it out there, I wasn’t gonna stand in the way. It was mostly done anyhow.”

“Oh no, don’t tell me we’re going to be waiting forever for a seque-” Kanaya stopped short, too caught up in the Complacency to remember herself. You had to give a bitter smile.

“Nah. Not forever. Rose’ll be back.”

The pair of you were quiet as you made your way to the lab were Rose rested. You didn’t let Kanaya into the sterile room, and she seemed fine with that, content to just stand and stare, hands folded before her, rested on the long skirt. A part of you noted their similarity in style and wondered who influenced who.

Eventually, Kanaya gave a single sniff and turned back to you. “Thank you for the opportunity. I will be leaving the country soon and couldn’t bear not saying good-bye.”

“Yeah no probs. Thanks for coming by, Rosie could use support other than me.”

You walked her to the end of the drive where she thanked you again. Before she got in the waiting car though, she hesitated and turned back. 

“Was there anything else that Rose wrote? Other than the Complacency?”

“Nah,” you lied off-handedly. “Not that I found, at least.”

“Really? It seemed in her writing that...” She trailed off once she noticed your face go hard. “Well. I must have imagined it. Will you please let me know if she recovers?”

She handed you a small black card, and departed. 

\--

That was a year ago. You’re now half-asleep, still managing to cry with drunken regret, further moistening your drafting table. You’ve managed to put away the nice vanilla vodka before you get worse. And by “put away”, you clearly mean “huck at the growing pile of blueprints in rage and frustration.” You should probably throw this attempt at the pile as well, but that’d require moving your head and you don’t think you’re up to that yet. Maybe in an hour or two. Or three, four, five little sheep...

Sleep. 

Dream.

“And you’ll ruin this pathetic attempt as well.”

You start up in your chair, nearly falling off, Rose’s voice clear as day behind you. “Wha-?”

Looking around, the room doesn’t look any different, but your dream Rose is before you, all grey and dim. You want to pinch yourself, make sure that you’re not hallucinating and this really is a dream. 

“Oh, so now she’s worried about her mental health. Not when writing starts to writhe, not when she easily countenances the murder of innocents, not when the scars on her body tally up with those in her mind. When an apparition of her dead daughter appears outside an endless whitespace.”

“ROSE ISN’T DEAD!” you scream at the thing, all desperate denial.

“I may as well be,” the thing you once called your daughter gestures to herself. “And soon so will you, if you keep trying to use your limited mortal psyche in ways like this.”

Your voice still hoarse from the sudden scream, you whisper, “What do you mean?”

“None of these _work_ , Mother.” It gestures now at the pile. “Keep this up and one day you will be desperate enough to build a faulty one, just to cross over for a final glimpse of your daughter.

Before you die, a tattered plaything in the foul grip of nightmares playing God.”

Your heart seizes, because for a moment you know that you’d do that. Calling the last dozen months anything other than self-destructive would be laughable. But...

“I need to save my Rosie,” you whisper, head downcast, heart twisted with your own failure.

“At this rate, you’ll only crush her further, watching her mother be warped and violated for the amusement of the Noble Circle.”

“But what can I do?!” you wail at your hallucination. Tears cloud your eyes and your nose runs.

“Nothing. There is nothing you can do alone.” You rub at your eyes, ready to deny it. “So accept our help.”

Your head comes up. The "our" really should tell you something. Hell, it does. You know whatever this hallucination is, it will probably have a goddamn reason for wanting to help you, and from reading Rose's journal, you're real fucking read up on shady paranormal entities offering deals. You're not getting anywhere with this, not anywhere fast enough. You sniff the snot back into your nasal cavities messily and ask,

"What's the catch."

The not-Rose entity seems to brighten, glowing from within, snapping and dimming like a phospor starting to fluoresce. A sardonic smirk that wouldn't look out of place on your Rosie crooks at its lips. "No 'catch.' Our price is our gift - allowing us a foothold in your world as your daughter did the horrorterrors. Except we come to defend it from their predations."

You are anything but an idiot, and you know that "defending" your world probably means staking claim to it, just like the ugly-ass fuckers who took your daughter. But these... things (the entity is now so bright it may as well be made of light) claim they can give you the means to rescue Rose.

It's hardly even a choice, is it?

"Done." 

\--

The pain is immense. From the moment the word leaves your lips, your world explodes into migraine-white light and your brain feels like it’s on fire. They say that the human brain cannot feel physical pain. Well that's all well and good, but it can fucking think it does and right now it's thinking up an excruciating conflagration. The words are apt, and you would be glad that you can't see yourself right now, head alight with a crackling halo of impossible energies. Would be, if you weren't busy shrieking yourself hoarse.

It's too much, and it doesn't take you long to beg it (them?) to stop; it's killing you.

"Foolish woman, we haven't the time for a slow corruption like what afflicted your daughter. Bear the pain and pay the price."

They (it?) stop speaking to you, the echoing voice(s?) fading under your continued screaming. You claw at your head, trying anything to make the pain stop, even as your body twists in pain. Your nails tear burning furrows in your flesh that you can barely feel over the excoriation of your brain. You should be blacking out by now, but apparently even that mercy is denied you. 

Your twitching body flops over onto your stomach and smacks your head on the ground. That dull strike barely registers, but to your maddened state seems a brilliant idea. You haul back your head and pound it into the ground, once, twice, three times, building a sick, cracking rhythm. Anything to stop the pain. You don’t care if you renege on this, if you can’t save your daughter. Anything to-

"Oh for pity's sake, you pathetic meatsack."

And then darkness.

\--

You wake in a pool of your own blood and other fluids. The drunk in you thinks _I have got to stop doing this_ even as you wipe a thin trickle of vomit from your mouth. The mother hopes it was worth it. But those parts are drowned out by a part of your mind thinking at the speed of light, thinking thoughts and ideas in a terrible angelic choir. Your once-brown eyes are luminous, their twisted and popped vessels lending them hideous a pink glow. A twisted, mad grin splits your face, and through the giggling-turned-mad-cackling you babble something that might be,

"Let's get to work."

The part of you that's just Roxy notes the fluid coming out of your ears and nose isn't blood and that there are gobs of grey matter on the floor.


	2. Of Night

Your name is Rose Lalonde. You are human. You were born in Rainbow Falls, NY, USA. Your patron is Oglogoth.

\--

The first thing you remembered about your new life was the burning. A feeling of terrible flames on a molecular, spiritual level. It erased you, excised you from the skin of reality as if you were the black ink of an unwanted tattoo and it the laser. No, not quite. A laser is quick, and this certainly was not. And you were not the ink, but part of the skin. Your mother's flames burned away the ink but it had it's claws too deep in you.

And so your consciousness evaporated with it, dragged screaming, but willingly with the foul thing as it was banished back to wherever it came from. Willing, because no matter that it twisted, mutated you, you defeated it and they would not have what they wanted from your body. 

Your mind, your soul, on the other hand, was theirs. So you shared in the corruption's agony as it was forced back into the lightless, abyssal plane from which it came. You were made aware that it forced this agony on your consciousness to lessen the effect on its own. Whatever it thought it accomplished with that bit of information is beyond you, because you gritted your metaphorical teeth and grinned at its pain, even as your soul screamed in reflexive agony.

In many spiritual practices, pain is meant to purify. In this case, all it seemed to do was empty you.

So when you entered that abyssal dimension, your soul was an empty vessel. You broke the surface like a meteorite, streaming fires of reality that were quickly extinguished in the impossible depths of that plane. The ethereal cold of that place struck your soul like a balm. The fact that it affected your erstwhile captor similarly was not lost on you. It seemed that you and they were more worryingly similar than you'd thought.

You would soon be more like them, the thing whispered. Wrapped about your essence like a foul shawl, it sunk its clawed limbs deeper into you. About to whisper some new corruption into your metaphysical ear, it was suddenly ripped howling from you in a flash of red, molten pain that lit your senses up briefly. Briefly, you saw the world around you for what it was, an unending nightmare-scape of rippling unflesh that housed and was your hosts. The Furthest Ring, the Plane of Dark Imaginings, the Noble Circle themselves, incarnate.

_She is not yours Nrub'yiglith, for she is all of ours, an honoured guest, a child returned,_ hissed Oglogoth in a voice that lapped at the shores of your sanity. It was as an ocean of the ichor that streamed through your throat, ran in your veins. The filling of your vessel began here. 

_Welcome Speaker, Herald Ours, Rose Lalonde._

\--

Your name is Rose Lalonde. You are human. You were reborn in Rainbow Falls, NY, USA. Your patron is Oglogoth.

\--

Over the course of maddening days, (hours? months? you could not tell) the Noble Circle detailed to you their plans for your reality and for you. The picture they painted took shape slowly in your mind, as direct, coherent speech seems to be a peculiarity of Oglogoth. The rest spoke in... well, they did not speak. Their ideas took shape in your mind as foetid concepts, blossoming into scenes painted with a brush of insanity. 

_\- an altar, surrounded by a crescent of howling madmen and women, **KNOCKING KNOCKING** , waving totems and fetishes in the air, screaming, begging for -_

Your mind cracked, and your vessel filled a little bit more.

You were to be their gate, a foundation for that creature Nrub'yiglith to build upon. Once his (or their? you did not rightly know, but suspected Nrub'yiglith was not of the Noble Circle proper) corruption had turned you into a suitable tool, you and he would have spread the word and corruption of the Furthest Ring amongst the real. And from their thoughts, the horrorterrors would feast, and perhaps someday be born. 

As your soulstuff quaked and shivered at the imaginings that they forced upon you, the scrabbling, still-sane part of you reflected that their desires, as far as you could understand them, were not necessarily malicious. You think of ranchers of the Wild West, having found a particularly fine way of herding and driving cattle. And you were the calf. That's all humanity was to them, that was all you were. Humanity could not even take care of itself, so they offered the safety of thralldom. You barely registered as a thinking thing, clearly incapable of the level of thought necessary to engage with the true intelligences of the world.

To most, at least. This Oglogoth, this presence at your back like a towering father-thing making sure his favorite child does not flee from her lessons, thought slightly different. It (he? no, you could not bring yourself to think that for more than a minute) wanted to hone you, make you a more capable... tool. How typical, that tools ranked higher than cattle, than their flock. 

He spoke to you, a welcome relief from the violation of the Noble Circle's probings that left you wondering at the shape of your mind and soul.

_Tool? Oh no, no, no. Nothing so simple Rose Lalonde. I will shape you, remake you, groom you and reshape you until you are able to take your place amongst us, in our appendages as the device you were meant to be._

You wanted to snort at the distinction, but lacked the physical prerequisites for it. Still, Oglogoth caught on and for a moment your mind was subject to a flash of anger, amusement, patience and... affection? all at once. Then it passed as the collective weight of the Circle's demi-hivemind pressed upon you their new plans for you. They still needed a means to speak their message, a Herald to spread the word, open the gates of humanity's minds.

You were assaulted with a flash of

_\-- heaving folds of soulskin through which terrible pseudopodia writhe and wriggle, a monstrous recreation of a human body, crossed with the worst conception of a kraken, a wheezing, half-alive thing of pale greyish peach, rotting purple and ink-like blue. a strangled cry from somewhere as violet eyes twitch open and the folds contract, ripple, birthing forth an abomination of anthrop --_

their intent. You were to be made into a breeding womb.

Like hell.

Behind you, around you, on your shoulder, you felt Oglogth's distaste/disappointment/rage/...interest.

\--

Your name is Rose Lalonde. You are human. You were reborn in Rainbow Falls, NY, USA. Your patron was Oglogoth.

\--

There is a certain sense, you supposed, that you would grow comfortable in the Furthest Rim. Your attraction to the dark and eldritch had been present from an early age, either nurtured by the Circle or merely convenient. Though you still quaked and gibbered in your ethereal form from time to time, you were adjusting to the different laws of reality here. A testament to the human mind. Distances and angles that your mind deemed unnatural, impossible, became merely quaint, picturesque even. It was almost as if you were on a permanent vacation in parts most foreign. A testament to white, upper-class privilege. You almost wished your mother had taken you on more vacations, a thought that was quickly followed by a pang of incredible loss.

Still, it likely would have been different without Oglogoth. The monstrosity took you in as a kind of ward. Or claimed you as a thought-slave. You couldn't tell. You learned that it opposed your selection as host, arguing that someone so attuned to the workings of the Furthest Rim shouldn't be wasted in such a terminal exercise. It detailed to you plans it had concocted for futures that would now never be. You were to be a grim prophet, a fell and subtle herald of the Noble Circle, culturing the minds of humanity until the whole of the psychoplane was a-buzz with the ideas and names of the horrorterrors.

You admit that it sounded like something you would have been good at.

Too, Oglogoth opposed the breeding stratagem, postponed it, argued that in your then-state your feeble still-human soul would break before they had even a half-dozen get. You learned something of how the Noble Circle governed themselves then. They worked by some manner of warped, warping consensus. Arguing, deliberating, corrupting others' minds and thought processes. Oglogoth showed and explained these things to you to forewarn you and, you quickly realized, to begin the corruption.

You took to it willingly, like a fish to swimming. Oglogoth was quite well versed in human survival instinct, it seemed. You were not about to become some breeding bitch to a coven of foul, immaterial cephalopods. So you learned its lessons, followed its lead. It taught you how to bend the entropic energies of that tenebrous plane to your will. It shaped you and allowed you to shape yourself into different forms, all horrific and wickedly alluring in the manner of all things profane. In whisperings that roiled across your skein like rotting seaweed, it made sure you understood that this would also protect you from the breeding, should it come to that. Your ethereal form would eventually be able to bear the soul-cracking process of spawning a new horror into unreality.

In Delphian seclusion, it taught you many things about the way your worlds worked. How the fading thoughts and memories of mortals fed this place, how murder

_\-- knocking knocking, a pale hand holds a knife, rams it precisely between ribs, piercing lungs and heart, once, twice, three times before breaking on another bone, knocking knocking --_

and sacrifice weakened the border and allowed worship to seep through more easily. You wondered if you would have become an architect of mass murder under Oglogoth's plans, but both you and it knew that you were capable of more discrete tactics. Over time that you lost track of, you learned what would be termed magic. In what could have been months or weeks, or years, you learned the difference between fate and destiny, kourvikoum and Seeing.

You think Oglogoth was pleased with how you willingly contorted your mind and soul to serve your survival and his purpose. To gain support, he allowed you to interact with more of the Noble Circle, first pathetic little Nrub'yiglith and then other grander, fouler beings. You found it much easier to bear and discern the thought patterns of the horrorterrors, their approval and interest in your toothed pseudopodia and glittering, polypian hair analogue. There was some disgust/condescension at your overtly physical, rather than implicated appearance, but you freely admitted that you had much still to learn, even as you skimmed the surface of their thoughts, remora-like.

In what amounted to social calls, you became vaguely aware of a coming judgement, gossip of some amateur planar intrusions and a distant, quickly-hidden fear of some unnamed predator-thing. You had little idea what could scare such beings, and quite frankly did not care to learn. You were more interested in this judgement of theirs. You sought out more information from Oglogoth, winding yourself about and amongst his thoughts like a beloved, needy daughter to make your interest clear.

Your answer came shortly, by whatever timescale that may have been. You were to be presented to the Noble Circle. The similarity between the "social calls" and this "society debut" and Edwardian society was almost hilarious. Or perhaps it was simply in your head. One's mind did influence how they saw the world around them, and that was nowhere more true that the Plane of Dark Imaginings. 

Regardless, eventually Oglogoth unfurled its ephemeral tentacles and you were presented in dark, terrible glory to the Circle at large. Your transformation nigh-complete, you were the practical ideal of horrorterror, a languid sprawl of rubbery not-skin, adorned with mouths and beaks like jewelry. You eschewed the penchant for eyes in excess of many of the Circle, Seeing more than they knew. And still, you clung to the implication, the inference of a young human woman, defying the oppressive corruption of the place. 

And so, the Noble Circle pronounced you acceptable, praising Oglogoth's work in a sussurating clamour of a million mouthless voices. With ungentle prodding they and poking, questing limbs and thoughts, they found your material, being, soul-essence, sufficient. In recognition of its foul work, Oglogoth would be given the right to sire upon you first. 

When his traitorous appendages whipped out, wrapping about to restrain you, you knew that his mind had been brought into consensus, either willingly or through corruption. As he whispers that it will not hurt, insinuates that he will show you the pleasures he learned of 

_\-- a beast with two backs, pale sweating things, a bald head buried in blond tresses, sick slapping noises, thrusting, knocking knocking, pale legs wrapped crookedly about a spindly body, and filthy and erotic moans gasped --_

in the mortal world, you go pliant in his clutch. As a slime-slicked positor winds its way across your form, slips up and penetrates what may once have been analogues to your various holes, you strike.

Oglogoth may have studied humanity, which made him ideal for rearing you, but he learned nothing of being a mortal. The memory of pain, humiliation, hatred and self-loathing spikes into him, shocking and disarming him.

_Yes,_ you bit out acridly into his mind, _teach the little human how to thoughtform. Make her resilient, capable of communicating with the Noble Circle. There will be no consequences to this, for how could a paltry mortal mind ever affect us?_

The implication of a young woman merges with your form and you rear up, Ursula reborn. Your lower half extended and curled phagocytic extensions around his member, dragging the monstrous appendage deeper into you, even as your mental construct ripped your self/body open to accommodate. As you ripped open his defenses with the contradictory love and resentment of a child for her mother, you speared him with the simple memory of cramps, a too-bright day after too long inside and the searing agony of your death. When he responded, you fought off his colossal strikes with mental shields of emotions alien to him. Contentment in a book. Affection for things dark and fluffy. The brittle love of a girl once your age. The strikes slid off like sludge against the hull of a ship.

You took more and more of him, bloating yourself until you were all but one. With an orgasmic mental sigh that sent shudders and ripples through the assembled circle, the last howling mouths vanished within your depths. A psychic sound like the snap of jaws signaled the end, and the beginning of your spiritual digestion. For all his observation, Oglogoth never learned the human soul, its ambition, lusts, craving for more beyond mere survival. 

_Yes,_ you broadcast, with dark amusement and sonorous inflection, _teach the human sorceress-aspirant Sight. No ill will ever come of that._

\--

Your name is Rose Lalonde. You were human. You were reborn in Rainbow Falls, NY, USA. Oglogoth was your patron.

\--

You reign now as one of them, a vessel filled. A horrorterror born of the traumatic mental domination of another. You are part of their consensus, twisting and being twisted in turn. At every turn you oppose greater involvement in mortal affairs, assuring and threatening that patience will see them further. They believe you, or don't. It has been an engaging second life, more fit for you than the dull fate of a human woman, scrabbling at her head with lost madness. As gossip of the amateur knocking, acknowledged now as probing, spreads it is revealed it comes from the mortal dimension, from the human world known as Earth. A secret smile graces your many mouths, as you have had a notion of the changes this knocking would bring. The Sight has let you know very little, but kourvikoum brings a certain clarity to what you do See. And your control over this most mercurial of mental skills is what secured your position in the Furthest Ring.

Even with all that, you are not prepared for the mental spasms that overcome you amongst the Nobility. Pseudopodia lash about directionlessly, mouths and beaks gnash a terrible black corruption leaks from the more human of your orifices. Your many-toothed tongue lolls out as you gasp for breath, grasp for control. But you are denied and a voice not your own thrusts its way out of your mind. You whisper now in Prophecy.

_Knocking, knocking on the door_  
 _Watching, searching without spoor_  
 _Knocking, knocking on the door_  
 _Twisted, cracking angels’ whore_  
 _Knocking, knocking on the door_  
 _Trading, selling souls for lore_  
 _KNOCKING, KNOCKING ON THE DOOR_  
 _A LALONDE, ANEW, TO WAR_

To the best of your reckoning, skewed as it has been from the warp and weft of this dimension, it has been relatively thirty years since your soul alighted on this blighted dimension. Three rough, uncertain decades of corruption, learning, transformation and negotiation. It has been thirty years since you last saw your mother, her face set in a look of horrified determination.  
A Lalonde, to war. That which doomed us before, a terrible determination, a too-bright mind set on one goal. Terrifying. Lovely.  
Thirty years, but you recognize her instantaneously as she manifests in the Furthest Ring in a BANG of actinic light.


	3. And Noon

When you finally cross over, it’s in a flash of eye-searing white that you’re long since used to. What you are less used to is the confusing sense of dislocation and the sense that you’ve forgotten everything you were just doing. It’s as if all of your thought processes terminated with your teleportation and then restarted on arrival. Hell, as far as you know that’s _exactly_ what happened. You stagger for a moment as your inner ear comes back online and realizes there’s no such thing as gravity. Or matter. Or anything that isn’t an endless horrorscape of glistening, rubbery flesh, strewn with eyes, mouths and worse.

The sight of it makes your consciousness want to retreat into your mind screaming, but it runs up against a bulwark of cold, white radiance. Your passenger speaks,

_Well that didn’t take long, you pathetic meatsack. Are you going to go fetal now, or start gibbering first?_

You marshal yourself and steady yourself on the gun you brought with you. A modification of the one you... hurt Rose with, you theorize it should be some defense against the things in this realm. Assuming you are given a chance to use it before your brain leaks from your ears at the sight of things humanity should never see. The figure in your thoughts gives something that might be a short laugh and you mentally give it a finger, before resolutely staring out into the Furthest Ring.

\--

You are half-buried under an uneasy retreat of thoughtforms and ethereal bodies as they rush from the intrusion of another reality upon their own. A susurrus of whispering hate grows as some identify the source of the clinical white light emanating from your mother. You catch fragments of ideas, stinging thoughts and the derisively spat concept of an "angel." You snort in agreement. An angel? Your mother? Hardly. It is a harsh thought, but not without a distant warmth and affection to it; the last vestiges of humanity scrabbling for something familiar, something real, something that isn't born of nightmare and dark imaginings.

Even as you laugh that off in the more secure recesses of your mind, you realize the Noble Circle do not refer to Dr. Roxy Lalonde herself, but what rides with her, in the labyrinthine corridors of her mind. You stare into the soul of your mother and are nearly blinded by the hateful whiteness perched, vulture-like, at its edges. A human part of you wars with the horrorterror wars with the daughter in that moment, so you are caught unaware as consensus demands you address the interloper on account of your distasteful familiarity.

Unconsciously, the pliant unflesh near your core warps and burbles into a facsimile of a human shape. The human and daughter thoughtsects shudder at its mockery even as you try to mould it into something half-remembered: your likeness. When your mother starts at the shape, you figure you've come close enough and direct the implication forwards, a dark emissary gliding over the skein and weft of your peers and lessers. A shard of your will stabbed into it and you have made an unholy ambassador to your mother. Idly, you wrap Nrub'yiglith about your shoulders like a shawl and it blinks, catlike, understanding your intent and subservient to your icy will.

 

\--

 

The ladies Lalonde regard each other over and across an abyss of impossibility and dark imaginings. They are a study in opposites, one a haggard figure in pristine white, all edges and mathematical intent, the other a regally poised implication, made up of tenebrous blasphemy and slippery thoughts. The doctor reaches out, hesitantly and her daughter mimics the gesture, stretching out from the gaping mass of maws and pseudopodia. Her fingers brush against an invisible sphere of reality and wisps of smoke curl up from the tips. Mother and daughter both jerk back their hands, one in pain, the other in painful sympathy. A stench like a graveyard burning wafts through nothingness, propelled on thoughts of subjugation and endless hunger.

With a sinuous flick, Rose discards the writhing, melting limb and forms another, staring at her mother over its elongating digits. Then, like the droning of a distant violin, _Hello, Mother._

"...that really you, Rosie?"

_Yes. How wise of you to ask and how foolish to expect anything resembling a truth from a Speaker of the Noble Circle._

Pink eyes widen and in the depths of the doctor's mind there is a cruel, alien laugh. A scowl of loathing crosses the facsimile’s rough approximation of a face.

_But perhaps to assuage your fears and shut that wretched cackling that passes for a voice up, might I inquire how Jasper fares?_

Slightly confused, and then catching on with a small smile, Roxy answers, "He's still hangin' in there. Lazy bugger these days, sleeps on me some nights."

Unfamiliar, human emotions tug at Rose's heartstrings, and a mirror of her mother's smile crosses the face of her implication. _That is... well. I am glad to hear that he is alive, still._

"You are too!" Roxy blurts out, cutting to the heart of the matter. The eye-aching pressure in her mind seems to rub its temples. _You have no thought for niceties or diplomacies, do you,_ it thinks.

In response, Rose takes in the form of her implication and the hideous, pulsating mass from which it emerges. A lone, slender tentacle rises up to stroke her face. _I suppose,_ she says. _Though the term alive is bereft of meaning here._

"No, I mean back home!"

Immediately the attentions of the Noble Circle are raised. Eyes and ears and tortured analogues of both are born, bursting and popping amongst the mass of thoughtplasm that fills this realm. Rose's form wavers, then steadies as she is forced to fight against the intruding thoughts of untold numbers of her dark kin.

_What?_ she manages, as she fends of an attempt to supplant her, forming a snapping beak with vipers for teeth that rips appendages free and sets a horrorterror shrieking.

Roxy looks around, discomfited by the sudden attention and clutches at the rifle. "When I shot you, the stuff infesting you evaporated. You just went into a coma and I figured I could maybe... bring you back."

For a moment that stretches an eternity in a dimension with no proper sense of time, Rose's human emissary is still, though still she had to throw off the demands and intrusions of the Circle. Within her totality, the Rose Lalonde that grew up in a nightmare dimension simply looked at the human girl she had been. A stiff, quivering lip that bespoke a determination to continue, to survive, to _thrive_ at any cost... and a desperate wish to just _go home._

In that moment, Rose's lip curls in a sneer and snarl. Her unholy flesh flares out in an explosion of ichor and rotting organs to form a loose web of a sphere around Roxy's. A terrible cry shrieks from pustulated orifices at the Circle. _DID YOU KNOW OF THIS?! SPEAK YOU WRETCHES, YOU PSYCHIC BEGGARS, CLAMOURING GUTTERFILTH!_

Roxy falls back, wincing at the shrill reverberations and trying to hold her breakfast in as dripping ethereal excreta touches her little bubble and sizzles into smokey nothingness. Where there once were unreal horrors made up of non-euclidean shapes, there is now an ever-retreating circle. The thing that was Rose seems to pulse with barely constrained power and rage. _Oh, she is a glorious thing of anger, isn't she?_  
You have that right, at least, you fritzing relic of a bygone dimension.  
"Hell if I know, I can't fucking see anything outside that!" Roxy gestures at the disgusting organic web they were encircled with.

_Well, I'd show you, but you'd likely curl up into a rocking, hollow shell of yourself again._

Rose's wildfire anger burns out quickly, however, as the violating insinuation of the consensus re-asserts itself and she becomes aware that the Noble Circle is paying heed to the exchange with the rapt attention of a child on its first day of school. They are no more aware of this than she is and they drink in the knowledge and possibilities with typical greed. A lithe, too-jointed hand grasping hand pets Nrub'yiglith with the promise of strangulation as she makes sure her once-kidnapper is equally ignorant. Indeed, all it recalls is being dissolved by coherent reality, stripped from an empty shell. Guided by the will of the Circle and her own pressing curiosity, Rose turns inward, forcing her human implication inside out, popping out within her protective cage.

Watching Roxy grimace up at her sends a pang of complicated, long-discarded emotions through the once-human. She pushes them away and focuses.

_Did you have a particular plan for bringing me back, mother?_

"Well, uh, no. I just sorta figured you were being held here somehow and I'd get you free, then shift back home." Roxy takes another look around and shakes her head. "But I guess it's not like you're a prisoner here, are you?"

_No,_ comes the response. _Not really._

"What's happened these past two years here Rosie? Why are you... like that?"

_Two years?_ the facsimile of Rose Lalonde goes still once more as she tries to process that. It had only been two years back in her old reality, while here it seemed half a lifetime. Or, more accurately, an infinitesimal fragment of eternity. _It's only been two years?_

"Yeah, and I'm sorry it took so lon- oh god. Oh god, Rose, how long have you been here?"

With a smile hooked up by the strings of a puppeteer, _Long enough to go native, as it were._

The fabricated torso stretches out and down, undulating like a snake until it rears up even with Roxy in her little bubble. _Alas,_ dear _mother, I must inform you that I am not held here by any chains, conventional or otherwise. Instead, you-_

"So, wait, what?" Roxy interrupts. "Are you trying to tell me that you're one of them now? Rose, these things ruined you throughout your life and-"

_And how do you know that?_ something flashes in the pits where eyes should be. _Were you not so oblivious to my life as a tortured childthing? Did you willingly turn a blind eye to the ruination of your daughter?_

"I...I don't know about that. I knew something was wrong, just... not what." A gulp that hurt to swallow, taking guilt and tears down with it. "I know I was a shitty mom, but I didn't know until after you... went away. That's when I read the Complacency. And... your diary. Sorry!"

Confusion reigns on the face of the construct and in the depths of the horrorterror that was once Rose Lalonde, until she recalls the novel she'd had intentions of getting published. And the diary written with words not her own and in a language not of that world.

_So long ago,_ she muses. _I suppose it must seem strange that I count myself among the Noble Circle now._

"Why though, Rosie?" A glimmer of wetness gathers at the rim of Roxy's eyes. Rose causes the implication to cock its head.

_Why? To survive. I consumed my mentor, or captor, or rapist or whatever one of a dozen titles you could saddle it with. I learned how to warp this dimension to survive, but to not become a plaything of these elder beings, I needed more._

The implication withdraws, slithering back up into the mass of flesh while gesturing at the entirety of the horrendous bulk. But the thoughts keep coming. _To ensure no other children of Earth fell prey to hungering, ethereal mouths, I needed power. So, fueled by the living essence of Oglogoth, I twisted myself, was reborn a horrorterror. From Speaker to one of the Noble Circle, in the blink of an eye, or a decade or two._

Across the expanse of Rose, hundreds of eyes snap open then, rolling madly for a instant, before focusing on the hateful bubble of reality. From dozens of misshapen maws, mouths and beaks, she speaks, _So no, I am not held here by any restraints, but rather the pressing weight of my own responsibility._

Roxy stands surrounded in the endless dark by gently undulating limbs and vestiges, watching the massive, gleaming eyes. It strikes her that they are so like Rose’s, just made huge. And the human emotions in them! Deep anger, hope, cold iron will, fear, uncertainty, and a distant love and affection. Further observations are cut short as her passenger remarks, _Oh, this is interesting._

With irritation, Roxy wonders at it what it meant. _There's a swelling wave in the consensus, which is a kind of unholy hive-mind, to make your daughter obey._

As panic and anger surge through the good doctor Lalonde, the presence continues. _Oh hush meatsack and let me finish. They_ want _her to go back, but she's resisting._

"Because you want to protect us," whispers Roxy.

_She's also now an impossible ur-being that can alter reality with the power of her mind and See the future. Such things corrupt._

Rose, meanwhile, is being forced to consider the desires of the Noble Circle. Through the susurrating voices she is made to understand what it would mean to have both a Speaker and an actual avatar of the Noble Circle present in the physical realm. Humanity's awakening to darker powers would be so much quicker, and the horrorterrors could feed properly once more. She feels the tremulous voices at the edge of the Circle, lesser beasts and debased nobility, reminding her that she hasn't been here long enough for her soul to start self-cannibalizing, for the ravenous madness to set in. She feels a fragment of that crippling hunger and mouths across her expanse slaver in acute empathy.

Her allies, quickly turning though they are, urge her to see the benefit. From the physical, she could regulate horrorterror/human interactions, choosing how the worship came to be, while still freeing the Furthest Ring from their millenia long famine. And too, whispers the consensus, it would not be as if she would lose the powers granted her. They feed her the words the hated

_\-- people in a metallic world, slowly being overcome by festering darkness, a blinding flash of light ascending, pale spectres of material science, the passage of aeons and universes, an eternal struggle of petty hate and hunger --_

angel spoke to her mother and lips curl across countless mouths.

_Yes, the corruption of power, little angel, you would know about that wouldn't you._ Rose thinks aloud.

_Oh, damnation._ comes the reply of the uncovered whisperer.

With a gleeful chortle, Roxy asks, "What, did you think they couldn't hear you? You reach across dimensions to talk to me in my sleep and you think they can't hear what's going on in my head here? Who's the dumbass now?"

_It appears to be time to undo your people's perfidy, young godling_ , says Rose as her implication once again emerges from her rubbery folds. _I believe I will return to the physical. Take in the airs. Convalesce. Perhaps I shall write... a Book._

Again, something dark glimmers in the depths of the implication's eye sockets and Roxy felt the hiss of annoyance and alarm of the apparent angel in her mind. In the distance, she catches the edge of the clamour of elder gods, victorious. _Write all you want, you inhuman witch, you will not displace our religions_.

_Displace? No, you are likely quite right. But I can make them irrelevant. Tell me, mother, how many books did Complacency sell?_

"A metric shitton and counting."

_Works of fiction will never achieve the output of proper worship-_

_Never is a poor choice of words when speaking in the Furthest Rim, you ethereal vagabond. When you cut the Noble Circle off with your counter-proselytizing, the population of Earth was in the millions. By the end of the century, it will measure more than ten_ billion. _Quantity has a quality all of its own._

The daughter lets that sink in and the mother fiddles with the gun absently. "So, uh, we done posturing dramatically here, or can I take my daughter and g-hrk!"

_No, we are not!_ shrieks the angel in her mind, seizing control of Roxy's nervous system. Her eyes blank and glow white, quickly turning a sickly pink as blood vessels begin to burst. Twitching in paroxyms of neural overload, the mouth of Roxy Lalonde spoke, "The deal -glrk- was to get your daughter back, -hrk- meatsack, not -huuuuuuunh- unleash an elder...thing onto reality again!"

_**Release her.**_

The command hits the body of Roxy Lalonde like a physical blow, and sends both consciousnesses reeling. The web of dark entrails wrapping them contracts, impinging onto the reality bubble. The thick scent of cooking flesh fills the sphere like smoke and hideously serrated teeth begin to grow into it from the melting ribbons of matter.

"Or wha-HRK!" A massive spasm wracks the body of the good doctor and suddenly it holds a device from its belt out.

"If you... don't fucking stop trying to hijack my fine ass, I will... turn this bubble generator right off and let us rot here." gasps Roxy Lalonde. "Or mutate. Or whatever the fuck happens."

_Mother_... 

"Quiet for a minute, Rosie. Look, angel or whatever you are, I get that you're pissed about your big bad enemies getting onto Earth but instead of going full psycho on us here, how about a compromise?"

At the speed of thought, the angel reads Roxy's intentions. Mildly impressed, it remarks, _That... would address the worship issue. But the presence of a horrorterror on the real remains unacceptable._

"Oh please. It's not like you lot don't already have your own foothold, right?"

_You have demonstrated far less tractability than-_

"You took over my fucking body you arrogant little shit!" Roxy explodes, shaking the gun at nothing. "What the fuck did you think was going to happen? Diplomacy, motherfucker, do you speak it?!"

A long silence followed, the tendrils surrounding the sphere backing off and flicking anxiously. Roxy crosses her arms and taps her foot on nothing. Presently,

_If you will do as we desire, and give us leave to control your carcass when necessary... I do not see why this arrangement could not balance out the horrorterror's plots._

_Like hell!_ exclaims Rose. _I will not permit my mother to be used as some manner of slave for a race that should have had the decency to roll over and die universes ago. You will vacate her consciousness forthwith!_

"Rosie," Roxy's answer forestalls the angel. "It's kinda too late for that. The only thing keeping my neurons firing right now is its power."

_I'm surprised you realized that, meatsack,_ remarks the creature in her mind.

"Dude. I snorted brain matter out my nose. Kinda sticks with a person."

_Mother... why?_ Rose's implication looked hurt and lost as it bobbed in front of the bubble. _I don't..._

"I needed to find you, Rosie," Roxy responds. "I couldn't do that alone."

_But I was fine! I survived, flourished, took power from this place and made it my demesne!_ Rose's constructed human form seems to shrink and recede in age. Roxy thinks briefly of a child throwing a tantrum and a little smile graces her lips.

"But I didn't know that," says the mother, swallowing. "So I worried."

She reaches out, as if grasping for something. A hand, a cheek, a writhing pseudopod of unreal grace and terrible origin. "Let's go home."

_...I don't know where that is anymore._ And a little part of Roxy's heart breaks then, at that little spoken reminder of her failures and Rose's loss.

"I'll be there. Can you find me, if I go?" 

Rose raises the hand of her implication, about to reach for her mother's. Then lets it drop. No sense in making this more difficult than necessary. _Perhaps. Go. We shall see._

Roxy's hand falls, following the path of the tears rimming her eyes.

"Ok," she manages, "I'll be there."

The doctor, mother, angel-host Lalonde removes another device from her belt and twists it. With an empty, silent BANG, the void reasserts itself and the world is blessedly dark once more. Gibbering entities rush to fill the gap where reality once was.

Another Lalonde, a dark goddess of warped concepts and blasphemous dimensions, turns from the space. The consensus of the Noble Circle of Horroterrors presses at her, filling her mind with the need to be gone. With a final act of defiance, she throws it off. _Yes, yes shut up already. I am the one crossing existences here, you simpering cowards. I must marshal myself._

And the Furthest Ring begins to stir with power it hasn't seen in millenia.

\--

You hit the floor of your lab, shaking with shock, terror and aching, abyssal cold from the translation. A reality bubble generator is only proof against the physical trials of the other dimensions. Your mind was still exposed to things it should never have seen.

_And without me, you would probably still have cracked,_ a too-familiar voiced muses. _Still, impressive that you held out that long._

With a trembling arm you reach out and try to lever yourself up. It quivers, gives out, and you crack your jaw off the cold tile. Another arm, both pushing now. You haul yourself to your knees, your feet, and take a few stumbling steps, before slamming into the wall. The pain is welcome, focuses you. A few more stumbles takes you to the door, past it, and soon you're bolting to Rose's bedside. You collapse to your knees beside her and take her small, pale hand. You are so cold, it actually feels warm for once.

"I'm here, Rosie. I'm here."

\--

If your arrival in the Furthest Ring was that of a meteorite plunging into the ocean, your departure is that of some vast, barnacle-encrusted vessel, rising impossibly up to the surface. Power swirls like sand about your abyssal form as your prepare to cross over. The rest of the Noble Circle rears back, not wanting to get caught up in your wake; they have no mortal form waiting for them. In truth, you are not sure you do either.

You begin the crossing, hauling back on all the power your vast soul can gather to itself, stretching it back like some fell slingshot, or a bow drawn by the hands of Artemis herself. There is the barest tremor in the draw, and the Furthest Ring goes silent, a collective breath held by elder gods with no need for air.

Then Artemis lets loose and your ascent begins in earnest.

\--

Her breath is mechanically assisted and her eyelids still. Years ago, her hands were slightly chubby, but finely, delicately wrought. Hands that could fly, clicker-clack, over a keyboard with ease. Hands that are now skeleton-thin, covered in skin like cheap paper. It was once so beautifully pale (and once, only once, cracked grey and black with the corruption of what she would one day embrace), but now only the pallid pinkish-grey of the near dead.

Still, you take her hand, gently. A whisper then, "C'mon, Rosie."

\--

The pain is immense. You distantly recall the burning you felt crashing into this plane and cannot believe that you ever forgot it. Like some ancient cephalopod seeing the sun again from the depths, the first rays of your old reality play across your senses. Unflesh boils, popping aqueously into Gigerian liquid, birthing nightmares for minds across the multiverse. As the leviathan that is your consciousness rises, intent on the material, mouths uncounted across your mass begin to scream. A reflex, no more, because your waking mind is focused on your task, of keeping your momentum up, not letting the torpid thoughtmire you rise from pull you back down.

As the tenebrous mass of your darkened elder soul breeches the Furthest Ring, it catches alight with the pure radiation between realities. That is when your waking mind joins the screaming, because __it is on fire_ _ and __you are dying.__

\--

The ventilator whirrs up to a higher setting as the cardiac monitor quietens. Your head comes up at the small commotion. Her heart and lungs are giving out, you realize, and as you mutter, "No, no, no, not now," casting about for some way to save her, your eyes catch on the EEG.

A small spike, a peak above the baseline background noise of a quietened mind. Another. And another. You watch your daughter start coming back to you, only to watch her body die.

\--

Searing cosmic fires lap at your disintegrating thoughtform, aflame with radiation and the pure agony of your soul. Flung free of the Furthest Ring now, the burning corpse of a titan tumbles terminally at the boundary of your destination. The thoughtsect of Rose Lalonde the writer suddenly sees the appeal of fire as a purifier as held by countless religions as your other thoughtsects weep or scream. As the horrorterror form born of the cannibalization of Oglogoth vaporizes between universes, something else emerges from its depths.

Small, compact, like an echo of Nrub'yiglith, an amoebic extrusion is spat out from your charring husk. All your consciousness, all your soul, all of who you are, were and will be is bundled up into that tiny black and violet cocoon. And even as that too begins to burn, you extend a questing palp at the membrane of reality before you.

\--

Tightly now, you grip her hand, shaking with grief, anxiety and self-recrimination.

"C'mon, c'mon, you can do it Rosie, c'mon...!"

Your passenger is a silent ghost at the back of your mind, but whether out of respect or something else you don't know.

"I know you can do it, Rose."

 

\--

 

 

 

 

 

_...se_

 

 

 

_...ose_

 

 

 

_...Rose_

Your burning palp splits into a claw-like mockery of a human hand and grasps at nothing once, twice. And then the very edges brush against something simply... warm. Claws recede into a simple skeletal hand as your close your hand around another's and pull. From the blistering cocoon you pull your implication-become-soul free and let the other's hand pull you... home.

\--

The only warning you get is a sudden spike in the EEG, and a high-pitched whine from the heart monitor. Then there is a sound like the world's largest sink backing up from Rose's throat and she's convulsing, hacking, horking up vile black ichor. It fills the breather and you scrabble at the mask, trying to remove it. Your daughter is still too weak, so her convulsions barely hinder you. You get the mask free, smearing some of the ichor across her face even as she vomits forth more and the monitor starts beeping insistently. You manage to roll her onto her side, and the ichor dribbles out, over the sheets and onto the floor.

A cough, then her eyes flutter, and a weak, rasping groan.

"Rose? Are you alright?"

"Eurglbglbx...gxzxg hlgtahn" was the weak reply, before a series of hacking coughs, and a great hork of spat out ichor. "Ugh. My... mind is on... fire, burning, so hot, so very... and I can barely... move my body... my mouth tastes like six kinds of death and... ugh."

Dull violet eyes wander sightlessly, then roll, worrying you. Then, with a flutter that clears an inky tear, they snap to focus on you. "So no, Mother, I am not alright."

A weak attempt to roll onto her back spurs you to help her over.

"But I will be."

And you break, crying her name, gathering her up into the gentlest, fiercest embrace you can manage. An atrophied arm tries to rise, pushes itself against your side, but eventually gives up, petting your hip.

"Um. There, there," she manages.

\--

Hours later, the sun is glaring through a window at you in late morning splendour. Your mother offered to close the blinds, but you needed to see it, feel the basic warmth of living on your skin again. You carry enough of the abyss in your soul, you could do with more of the bright azure. After something passing for a gruel slides down your gullet, it occurs to you to ask,

"Mother, what deal did you make with the angel, to get it to shut up? Something about worship, or compromise?"

Roxy Lalonde has the grace to look chagrined. She cocks her head to the side, away from you, and mutters something, presumably at her passenger. It sounds very much like, "Stufoo."

You roll your eyes, an act that takes far more energy than you'd like. "Well?"

"Um, let's say, that, well, when you write about the horrorterrors, you were going to write about the angels too, anyways, yeah?"

You stare at her. Human emotions are still somewhat alien at this point, but you are fairly certain this one is "disbelief."

"I cannot believe you."

"Sorry!"

"After several decades, or a few years I suppose, now you decide to interfere with my life, pay attention to my writing?"

"Sorry!"

Shaking your head is out of the question, as you begin to slip into the lesser abyss of sleep. But you roll your head in her direction. And as the sun reaches its apex above your house, you murmur,

"It certainly took you long enough."


	4. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> one year later

There was a house in Rainbow Falls where the sun shone too brightly, or not at all. And now, sometimes, both.

The chauffeur gets the door for you, and you slide out of the limo, smoothing your long, white skirt. The sun shines high above and clouds pass it swiftly by, blown by a stiff breeze. You clamp down the massively-brimmed sun hat and begin your walk up the path leading to the house. Thankfully it is smooth, not cobbled, and the clicking of your heels is swallowed in the soft roar of the waterfall. From a distance, it is much as you remember it but as you draw nearer, the sense of something distinctly off makes itself known to you. And it is not just the missing observatory.

As you cross the burbling brook that has branched off the main river, a cloud passes overhead and throws part of the house into shade. Looking up, you think that perhaps the shadows are too dark, the shade too deep and lingering. Fitting, you suppose. Stepping into the overhang, you reach the doors, taking welcome refuge in the cool, permanent shade. The heat of the sun's rays begins to lift off your white linen like magic and you sigh slightly.

The doors, you notice, are open, so you step in, pressing a gloved hand to the door and moving the massive thing with ease. Inside is a study in pale gloom, white walls stripped bare of decorations long ago. Plinths that no longer hold hideous wizard statues stand empty. The whole of the place feels impossibly, disjointedly old. Modernist architecture mated with archaic atmosphere. A sniff registers no scent of dust, but rather scents antiseptic and...

You shudder. You would mistake this place for an abandoned hospital, were it not for the sense of eldritch pressure slowly building. Then a soft step, almost unheard, brings the pressure to a head and turns you towards the massive stairs. 

"Oh," she says, her voice quavering. "I wasn't aware we were having guests."

Even in the gloom, she casts a shadow, an impossibly long, shifting thing. Hairs raise on the back of your neck as you take in the changes the years have wrought on her in an instant. Where before there was a full and robust figure, there is now only a bare suggestion of curves, hidden beneath clothes so loose as to be called robes. Eyes that were always darkened are now positively sunken. A skeletal hand with fingernails unpainted rests itself on a bannister. For a moment, you think the gesture is for support.

Then the moment is over and the power quavering her voice brushes over you, shivering. You take in the hunch of the frame and recognize it as a predator's stalk, or a guardian's loom. And sunken the eyes may be, but they are alight with intelligence and wisdom beyond her years. A familiar, sardonic quirk of chapped lips and you have to lick at yours.

"Rose," you say, managing not to lose control of your voice. For all your unease, there is real warmth therein. "I am glad to see you are doing well."

She straightens proudly, almost sensuously, at that and brushes at hair so white as to be nearly transparent. Unconsciously, she begins to twirl at a strand before catching herself. Her eyes rake at you, taking in the white cloth covering every inch of you. The smirk stays, but softens, and her eyes take on a touch of sadness, loss indefinable.

"It's been so long." Words murmured, but perfectly intelligible to your ears, as she descends. "How much you've changed, Kanaya."

And you smile, fangs and all.

 

 

 

 

 

RL will return.  
The Dolorosa will return.


End file.
